People generally prefer their RPGs to be realistic,it just adds to the game.
Of course, because suddenly becoming stronger after gaining an arbitrary amount of experience from killing enemies, and thereby being able to improve your skills at picking locks or healing wounds is COMPLETELY, 100% realistic. I mean, who HASN'T ever gained knowledge of science from shooting oversized scorpions? That happens to me every day!
No, RPGs are actually probably one of the LAST places I'd look for realism in a game, to be honest.
This basically. I just hate it when people take it too far "dual-wield, bullet penetration, proper reloads(uneeded) etc." I mean to paraphrase Yahtzee "If it was realistic you would be fighting your enemy from several blocks away, get hit in the leg and sit in a hospital for months recovering."
Except dual wielding is quite unrealistic, in fact, and it usually shows up in works that gladly ignore realism if the designers think it would be fun, cool or whatever.
Still, you're right that full realism wouldn't be fun, but that doesn't mean that just because something would be realistic means it's automatically a bad thing.
though I tend to find it more amusing in fantasy RPG forums- what points up the absurdity more than squawking about real-world realism in a game where people conjure magical fireballs, right?
To be perfectly fair, just because something is fantasy doesn't mean it completely ignores real life logic, in fact, in all the fantasy novels I've read, the heroes still need food and water, and sleep. More often then not, a certain
other need is never adressed, but we can probably assume that they still do it, it's just not described, so we can still have realism in fantasy, just because a setting has certain unrealistic things doesn't mean it can't still strive to reflect reality in things that still apply in the real world. All in all, though, when dealing with fantasy, consistency is much more important than realism, and honesty, to an extent, the same applies to science-fiction. For the sake of enjoying a work of fiction, I can buy that there's a race of lizard people in a world and people can shoot fireballs from their hands, I could also buy a virus that makes people become big, green, and sometimes makes them stupid, I can even believe that there's a man who can fly, immune to bullets, and can punch through solid concrete. But when you start randomly adding new traits to something that I've so far suspended my disbelief on without explanation because the plot says so, that's a little harder for me to buy.
But the problem with asking for realism in video games is that games aren't really created to simulate real life, they're created to be entertaining, so their first priority needs to be entertaining the player, not being realistic. This is not to say video games can't, or should not also try to be realistic, to an extent, as I've said earlier,just because something is realistic in a video game does not mean it's a bad idea, it just doesn't mean its a good idea either, sometimes, a bit of extra realism can help to make the game more fun, sometimes, it can make it really annoying, it all depends on what, exactly, is done to make it realistic and how far the designers go to achieve this, it also depends somewhat on the style of the game, what is an ideal level of realism in a game can vary from person to person and from game to game. In the end, I really don't want to have to eat, drink, sleep and use the bathroom in a game like Fallout, I also don't want to be able to bleed to death from one shot to the leg if I don't get medical attention quickly and still have it crippled for months, if not for life. On the other hand, I wouldn't really object if the designers tried to simulate realistic bullet physics instead of having them just go in a straight line, or if the enemies actually behaved somewhat intelligently in combat instead of just blindly running at te player and shooting, or the designers tried to make the geography and ecology of the game feel somewhat believable, in short, realism is fine as long as it doesn't hurt gameplay, or even better, adds more depth to it, but if realism just makes the game unnecessarily tedious, frustrating and annoying and not fun at all, than it's not wanted.
» Sat May 28, 2011 3:00 am 
dam near died laughing. Im ok wiht some realism but seriously? its a video game, you want the extreme amout of realism some of you want, go out in the middle of the desert, irradiate urself and then fight the soldiers who were gaurding the nuclear material, with which u irradiated urself. then come back and tell me if u want realism, or to play a nice GAME 
